Markup Languages and Note Taking/Meeting Notes 2017-10-16

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Markup Languages and Note Taking

Date
Monday, 16 October 2017 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm
(Thanksgiving! Scheduled for the 2nd non-holiday Monday of the month)
Event Announcement
https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/243068343/
Location
Communitech Jelly Bean Room 1st Floor, 151 Charles Street West, Kitchener, Ontario Map

How do you take notes? What software exists for note taking? What markup language is best for taking notes? Are your notes available on your phone or tablet? How do you synchronize them? How do you publish your notes online? When is it better to use a Note Taking application rather than a proper Word Processor?

This month we invite all the devotees of MarkDown, WikiText, MoinMoin, YAML, and LaTeX to contribute to the discussion at our round table.

--Marc Paré & Bob Jonkman


Resources

Note-taking applications
Markup Languages
Markup Editors


On creating a standard Markup Language:

standards.png
Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.


Meeting Notes

Practices
  • Bob edits notes directly into MediaWiki
    • mounts website locally, edits with his text editor, saves directly to website


  • Steve's practice is to separate content from form
    • Create content first, but in a way that it's easy to add formatting stuff later on
      • WordProcessing doesn't do that, tries to do them both
      • WP tries to be an operating system
      • On all principles, WP are bad
      • But LibreOffice tries to fix that, its internal format is not proprietary
      • Valuable for
    • When writing, be concerned primarily with content, secondarily with syntax, format
      • Can always add typographical content (the markup) afterwards
    • eg. Wordcount isn't really needed, can't do it accurately with
    • Steve uses his own markup, similar to Markdown, related to groff
      • Only worries about paragraph breaks and lists, maybe section headers
      • Does not want ML to interpret line breaks, unless there's two in a row
      • Always works in Linux, so LF only
    • Steve uses AWK script to render text,
      • But how to apply markup to a previous line?
    • Uses VIMperator in Firefox to edit online content


  • Kirk managed documentation in SGML using James Clark's DSSSL processor called "Jade" to generate RTF, TeX,
    • DSSSL ==
    • James Clark also wrote groff, modelled on SoftQuad troff
    • Schema for SGML was DocBook
    • None of which gave the results, so he used
    • DocBook in XML
    • Kirk wrote a stylesheet in XSLT to turn DocBook into XML for LibreOffice
      • "compiled" documentation, literally using "make"
    • XML provides rigid consistency, important to typographers
    • Also created WinHelp files with DSSSL
      • Also tried to create TeX files
    • The important part is that a single source document created multiple output file formats


  • Nick
    • Taking notes for school,
      • OneNote can be handy, good for finding notes and subcategories
    • Adapting different note taking for different purposes, even sticky notes
    • Different apps are suitable to different purposes
    • Short term is good with StickyNotes or Xpad
      • Version of StickyNotes with Win10 is colourizable
    • November is NaNoWriMo month,
      • Use OneNote is nice because it organizes a lot of notes, eg research, character development
      • But not for the actual manuscript, use a WP for that
    • There's a StickyNotes app for Android (link?)
    • Different situatation: Academic, professional, hobby -- all have different requirements, different needs
    • How to do the website?
      • Not his website, done on webs.com
      • Needed to directly edit HTML in webs.com, no feature to FTP content
      • The webs.com HTML viewer is not so great, uses his browser to download source, converts to PDF for a rough idea, then copy'n'paste back into the site
    • Notepad++ has nice indenting
    • Nick's site is largely static, but needs to update meeting events
      • Gets content from HTML e-mail, imports to Word, saves as HTML, then massages by hand (Word generates very verbose HTML)
      • this is a pretty common technique with other SysAdmins


  • Raymond
    • Casual note taking (temporary), eg library cards
      • Needs to do it on the cellphone
      • Notetaker on iPhone
      • Google Keep on Android --
        • Has checklists! Good feature!
        • Google Notebook was good, no longer exists
      • Uses computer to enter content for reading on cell phone
    • For serious notetakig
      • Started with text files, but that's a problem, eg. need diagrams, searching
      • Searchable is a top requiremetn
      • Offline use is important (Bob has horror story_
      • Organization is important,
      • Re-ordering, re-
    • Javascript, programming
    • Using Evernote for a long time
      • Has a limit on the traffic, now restricted to two devices (annoying with Macbook, cell phone, office desktop)
      • Can search, even text in pictures.
      • Free (as in gratis)
      • Crossplatform
      • Evernote and StickyNote can synchronize!
    • Tried OneNote years ago, didn't work well
      • Formatting or search ability wasn't good enough
  • Mojtaba is not a heavy note taker
    • Tried OneNote
    • gedit and vim on the desktop
    • Google Notes on the phone
    • Plain text!
    • Does programming with vim
      • just search through directories with egrep


Raymond has used Atom.io competitor Sublime text Mojtaba has used vundle (package manager for vim)


  • People using online apps to synchronize between devices
  • OneNote does not have an import/export function
    • Raymond can set up a channel ifttt (If This Then That)
    • But OneNote is too proprietary to get stuff out


    • Steve: Organize stuff in a file system to make it easy to find
      • Doc files in one subdir, PDF in another, then create a "logfile" to locate stuff
      • Keep notes organized by project, more concerned with content


Tech stuff
  • How is a "schema" different from the ML?
    • SGML and XML are serialization formats, taking data and turning it into one long stream of characters
    • DocBook and DITA are schemas that specifiy the allowable data elements eg, a DTD in HTML or SGML
    • XSLTProc using DocBook stylesheets to render HTML


  • What is the format that uses separate lines for markup, eg.
Heading
=======

Subheading
----------


Requirements
  • SGML and HTML and XML aren't meant for writing, but for semantic meaning
    • More of an interchange format
    • Editors need to be for getting content into the editor quickly
    • Choose an editor or Markup Language for "pretty", how it appears
    • or choose an editor/ML for semantic meaning


Future topics

  • Scripting languages
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